Deadly fungus gets sexy in heat

A DEADLY fungus thought to be asexual turns out to have a sex life after all, making it far more capable of evolving drug resistance than expected.

Paul Dyer of the University of Nottingham, UK, and his team discovered sex genes in the genome of Aspergillus fumigatus. They found both sexes in almost equal proportions in the wild, which is "what you would expect for a sexual organism", says Dyer. But the fungus only mates in favourable conditions, such as at a toasty 30 °C (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07528).